I am the president of Metis Strategy, a CIO advisory firm that I founded in 2001. I have advised many of the best chief information officers at multi-billion dollar corporations in the United States and abroad. I've written for the Wall Street Journal, CIO Magazine, CIO Insight, Information Week and several other periodicals. I am also the author of Implementing World Class IT Strategy: How IT Can Drive Organizational Innovation (Wiley Press, September 2014) and of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs (Wiley Press, December 2009), a book on leading IT practices that has sold over 12,000 copies around the world. Since 2008, I have moderated a widely listened to podcast entitled “The Forum on World Class IT,” which features a wide array of IT thought-leaders, and is available at www.forumonworldclassit.com on a biweekly basis. I have been the keynote speaker at a host of corporate conferences and universities in the US, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, Spain, China, India, Australia, and Saudi Arabia. You can reach me at peter.high [at] metisstrategy.com or on Twitter @WorldClassIT

ADP's Secret To Innovation: Combine IT and Product Development

It is an exciting time to be tapped into the chief information officer community by virtue of the top-tier leaders who are doing extraordinary things from that post. I have extensively covered the topic of the CIO-plus in a series in Forbes that can be found here.

Mike Capone has many attributes that are common among executives who have been asked to take on additional responsibilities to their CIO roles, a phenomenon that I refer to as the CIO-plus. Capone’s undergraduate degree is in computer science. He has an MBA. He spent time in IT early in his career, but also had experience outside of IT prior to returning as the first-ever Global CIO of ADP.

The nature and seniority of that experience clearly sets him apart. He made a name for himself at ADP as the general manager of the company’s Global Human Resources and Payroll Outsourcing Business, a division that serves large multinational corporations. It is this operating experience and profit and loss responsibility that is often missing among CIOs, and it often proves detrimental to those who would like to add responsibilities to their CIO responsibilities, or for those who might be interested in risking beyond CIO. (For more articles in my series on CIOs who have risen beyond that role, visit this link)

Asked why he thought to make the move to the CIO post after running a division of the company, Capone noted that he recognized the power of the role from an early age, as his father was once the CIO of J.C. Penney. Therefore, Mike is one of the only father/son CIO-pairs.

It should come as no surprise that Capone has thought of the CIO role differently as a result of having been a leader of one of ADP’s businesses. He fostered synergies and reduced the cost of IT across the business units by identifying more that could be done commonly. He also created an imperative for IT to be a source of innovation for the company. On that front, he invested significantly in innovation activities during the depths of the economic malaise, recognizing that it was important to continue to build the IT organization’s innovation capabilities to prepare for sunnier days ahead. He created an innovation lab in IT, and holds an annual conference of ADP’s top IT executives from around the world where new ideas are showcased, and the next generation of innovations is developed.

Capone has gotten his team increasingly involved in customer calls, both with existing and potential customers. As part of an initiative that he refers to as “Know Your Business”, he requires that members of his leadership team spend a day and a half with customers each month. The organization has found that the sales yield is higher when IT leaders are involved. Capone has also noted that his team is better equipped to develop innovative ideas when an IT leader get unfiltered information directly from customers about what technology they like or dislike. Better insights are generated.

Capone was so successful as a CIO and in developing innovative customer and company facing technologies that he was asked to take over Product Development in the second half of 2012. As Capone points out, “Virtually 100% of ADP’s products have a technology component to them.” Therefore, by having a well-rounded business and technology leader translate product opportunities into technology solutions seamlessly means that products can come to market faster.

Innovations that his team has led or at least been a part of include the ADP National Employment Report where ADP has been able to mine its data on US employment levels. It is all the easier for the company to pull off given the fact that it produces one in six pay checks across the United States. ADP has increasingly innovated on the mobile front, creating mobile versions of a variety of its products. Chief among the success stories has been a full-featured mobile application to run payroll, which leapfrogged the market, and made quite a splash among ADP’s clients.

Capone measures IT’s effectiveness less on traditional measures such as systems uptime and the degree to which projects are delivered on-time and on-budget (though these are metrics he still tracks), and more on business metrics that IT can influence. As an example, he points to sales productivity. Over the past few years, sales productivity has increased by 20%. Much of this has been due to ADP’s having better products to sell. Capone knows this because, along with the Sales team, he tracks the impact that new products have on sales. This means tracking everything from the number of appointments it takes to close a deal on a new product with a potential client to the amount of times the new product is sold in a given launch period.

It is important to note that Capone credits a portion of his success to his long tenure with ADP. He says, “I’d rather have many positions in one company rather than the same position in many companies.” Capone has had such a diverse array of positions that the insights he can garner from across these positions within ADP is tough to match.

The future is bright for Capone, and don’t be surprised if this CIO-plus rises beyond CIO in the not-too-distant future.

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